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Steps would do for pedestrians, but horses, chariots, and beasts of burden generally would require the last-named contrivance. All who have attempted restorations have copied the arrangement of these stairs and sloping roads from the ruins of Persepolis, where the steps, being cut in the rock itself, are still to be traced.
The river had sunk to a very low point, so that the port and bathing-place of the village now lay at the foot of a long sloping bank, and a large cayman made his appearance in the shallow and muddy water. We were all obliged to be very careful in taking our bath; most of the people simply using a calabash, pouring the water over themselves while standing on the brink.
We entered the town by some very sloping steps, which led through the gateway, passing some wells and the indigo dyers outside; also some horrible pools where they had put the little fish that the camels eat, to drain the oil from them. We entered a sort of square, having the castle on the right-hand side and a ruined mosque in front of us.
One small window, with two panes of glass was set high under the eaves on the side toward Casey. Cleverly concealed it was, built to resemble the ledge. Visible from one side only, and that was the side where Casey stood. At the back the sloping boulder, untouched, impregnable; at the north and west, a twist of the ledge that hid the cabin completely in a niche.
The floor was of stone or concrete and in the centre of the space the height from floor to the highest point of the gable roof was about 7 feet, sloping to 4 feet 6 inches at the sides. The authorities cannot be credited with being liberal in assigning us space. The roof rafters were spaced 10 feet apart and between each two of these five men had to shake down their beds.
The sides of the hills, sloping towards the glen, were either covered with forests of spruce firs, or broken into patches of prairie grass and sage bush, the latter about as high as the strongest heather, and equally tough and tiresome.
Marguerite threw open the casement and sat down on the wide sill, leaning her head against the window-frame, and gazing out into the fast gathering gloom. From far away, at the foot of the gently sloping lawns, the river murmured softly in the night; in the borders to the right and left a few snowdrops still showed like tiny white specks through the surrounding darkness.
"Alas! brave Mendo, it is only the sloping sun upon the snows but there is hope yet." The soldier's words terminated in a shrill and sudden cry of agony; and he fell dead by the side of Quexada, the brain crushed by a bolt from a Moorish arquebus. "My best warrior!" said Quexada; "peace be with him! Ho, there! see you yon desperate infidel urging on the miners?
"Ah, that's just prime," he sighed; and he raised himself a little more, and then, as he thrust out one hand to get a fresh hold of the bamboo batten, he stopped short, silent and motionless, and with cold perspiration breaking out all over his face, for his hand had closed upon one of the battens, which felt cold and scaly; and but for the fact that his left arm was hooked over one of the sloping supports of the ridge-pole, he would have dropped heavily back on to the floor of the elephant-stable.
As Milt had headed westward from Butte, as he rattled peacefully along the road, conscious of golden haze over all the land, and the unexpectedness of prairie threshing-crews on the sloping fields of mountainsides, a man had stepped out from bushes beside the road, and pointed a .44 navy revolver. The man was not a movie bandit.
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